Entrepreneurs need to learn new traditional management skills to improve their ability to both attract funding and succeed. That is the message I delivered in a local TV interview discussing #entrepreneurship in Northern Virginia. The region is now called “Silicon Valley East” based on the surge of entrepreneurial ventures in the area. Check out

To help entrepreneurs succeed given that 50 percent of all new ventures fail within five years, I will be reinforcing the same message in other forums in coming months

Paul B. Silverman is Managing Partner of The Gemini Business Group, LLC, a new venture development firm dedicated to helping global entrepreneurs succeed (www.geminibusinessgroup.com) . He writes and speaks about entrepreneurship, healthcare, analytics, and strategy management and is the author of “8 Building Blocks To Launch, Manage, And Grow A Successful Business.” Sign up for Entrepreneurship Today! email updates to track latest new venture developments. – See more at: Paul B. Silverman Blog

One of the best roundup articles showing forecasts and outlook in these explosive growth markets. All businesses and providers must recognize the challenges that must be met and how all must adapt to secure real value from these trends.

Summary:

Summary of my recommendations in posted comments here – view big data/analytics/IOT as ‘technology enablers’, enabling you to improve and streamline business processes. The winning strategy- get past what I call the ‘gee-whiz’ factor, recognize IOT, analytics, and other technologies are a “means to the end,” driving new business processes to reduce costs, increase revenue, and improve strategic position.

Forbes article is highly recommended reading for all interested in big data, analytics, and IOT.

Article quotes Digital analyst GSMA Intelligence that “… there are now more than 7.28 billion active mobile connections globally compared to 7.20 billion humans as per the US Census Bureau’s world population clock. What is more, these gadgets are multiplying 5 times faster than we are.”

Implications:

While mobile phone and data services in developing economies are growing exponentially, IOT applications and millions of IOT devices are a major driver fueling mobile services global growth.

IOT captures millions of information elements in many businesses, but today’s firms face three challenges to use this data:

1. How do you use this information to reduce costs, increase revenue, and improve strategic position ?

Today, most IOT is not effectively used. One example I like to use is McKinsey’s perspective looking at the oil drilling sector:

“… most data generated by existing IoT sensors are ignored. In the oil-drilling industry, an early adopter, we found that only 1 percent of the data from the 30,000 sensors on a typical oil rig are used, and even this small fraction of data is not used for optimization, prediction, and data-driven decision making, which can drive large amounts of incremental value.”

I see a similar situation in other sectors

2. Who is assigned responsibility to maximize the benefit of IOT?

Maybe the CIO, or Operations Manager, Production Manager, Customer Service Manager, or other functional group? For the oil drilling sector, safety and muster drill compliance are critical factors and safety executives may be the decision makers. But to maximize IOT benefit, the starting point I always emphasize is understanding the value chain – that means quantifying value chain metrics, defining peer group benchmarks, identifying operational information ‘gaps’, and other management metrics to drive an optimum IOT solution. This is done before the first IOT device is installed with strong participation and management oversight at the “C” level.

3. How do you realign organizational structures given the reach and capabilities of IOT?

Think about production and operations management whereby decision making is often done by highly experienced line management with decades of experience. Or customer service and support groups using well-established, ‘proven’ techniques that have worked well for decades. Now imagine replacing that with ‘algorithm decision making’ whereby integrated IOT and analytic models provide optimized decisions in the key value chain elements from supply side management and production through sales and customer service. How do you align the organization to meet these changing needs, what new skills are needed; what should be outsourced; how do you transition the organization to support the new business models- these are representative challenges that must be met for an organization to capitalize on the IOT and big data ‘tsunami’ we are now seeing.

My recommendation is view IOT and big data as ‘technology enablers’, enabling you to improve and streamline business processes.The winning strategy- get past what I call the ‘gee-whiz’ factor, recognize that IOT, analytics, and other technologies are a “means to the end” driving new business processes to reduce costs, increase revenue, and improve strategic position.

Hispanic Entrepreneurs Are Beating Expectations and Bolstering the U.S. Economy

This point obviously seems to be missed in our current political debate. And the conclusions here are driven by numbers and data, not rhetoric. Hispanic entrepreneurship helps drive our economic growth.

In recent decades, the number of Hispanic entrepreneurs has grown exponentially. From 1990 to 2012, the number of Hispanic entrepreneurs in America more than tripled, going from 577,000 to more than 2.0 million. This surge far outstripped population growth among the working-age Hispanic American population. It also dwarfed the growth in the number of self-employed non-Hispanics during that period, which grew by just 14.0 percent—roughly one eighteenth as fast as the Hispanic rate.

Hispanic immigrants, particularly those from Mexico, played a key role in this growth. Between 1990 and 2012, the number of Hispanic immigrant entrepreneurs more than quadrupled, going from 321,000 to 1.4 million. At the same time, the number of self-employed Mexican immigrants grew by a factor of 5.4, reaching 765,000. Entrepreneurship became so established among Mexican immigrants that by 2012 more than one in 10 such immigrants was an entrepreneur.

There are far more Hispanic entrepreneurs today than expected. In 2012 the rate of Hispanic-American entrepreneurship was more than one whole percentage point higher than we would expect based on factors like population growth, language proficiency, and family structure. Hispanic immigrants overcame obstacles that hinder entrepreneurship at even greater rates: Among that population, the entrepreneurship rate was 2.1 percentage points higher than expected, resulting in an estimated 251,000 additional entrepreneurs in 2012.

Hispanic entrepreneurs helped power the economy during the recent recession. While entrepreneurship rates among non-Hispanic, U.S.-born individuals dropped during the decade that included the recent recession, the number of Hispanic entrepreneurs grew by 71.5 percent. That made a notable difference on the U.S. unemployment rate: If the 581,000 Hispanic immigrant entrepreneurs who created businesses from 2000 to 2010 were instead unemployed in 2010, the unemployment rate would have been 0.4 percentage points higher, topping 10 percent.

As entrepreneurship levels have dropped in recent years, Hispanics have increasingly focused on founding new businesses. In 2012, the rate of self-employment dropped to its lowest point in decades, reaching 10.0 percent. But from 2010 to 2012, the number of Hispanic entrepreneurs grew by 160,000 people. For the entire 1990 to 2012 period, Hispanics added new entrepreneurs almost 10 times faster than the population overall.

Hispanic immigrants now have higher entrepreneurship rates than the U.S. population overall. While 10.2 percent of the U.S. population was entrepreneurs in 2010, 11.0 percent of Hispanic immigrants were. By 2012, that gap had widened to 10.0 percent and 11.7 percent, respectively.

Excellent global logistics report by Colliers – check out last several sections on “Last Mile Innovations” in U.S., Europe, EMEA, and Asia Pacific

Further reinforces the outlook I and many others share – significant opportunity ahead for innovative integrated analytics and IOT applications that change business processes to lower costs, increase revenue, and improve strategic position. Look at the case studies here for Amazon, PeaPod, others and you see some examples of best practices in using technology to re-engineer and streamline processes, and create new business models. We are only at the beginning here based on the entrepreneurial opportunities I see emerging addressing these applications.

Posted comments today on interesting article on “The Psychology Behind Why Gaming Helps Students Learn” in K-12 Tech Decisions. Article focused on how educational gaming helps students learn and provides good insights for using educational gaming for management training as I noted in my comments. My comments also noted that educational gaming is a high potential growth market

To further reinforce this point, McKinsey&Company’s September 2015 report on K-12 education technology noted increased opportunities in the K-12 and higher education sectors, and investment is increasing rapidly. The report notes that the number of annual private-equity deals has more than doubled, from 30 in 2007–10 to about 70 in 2012–14. They also note that venture capital firms have entered the space like never before, investing $1.87 billion in 2014, up 55 percent from 2013. Link to McKinsey& Company education technology report at Link to the McKinsey report at McKinsey&Company Ed Tech Investment Report

Thanks for interesting article. While your focus is K-12, many of your findings apply to both university level and corporate/executive training as well. My observations are based on corporate and entrepreneurial management experience, serving as an adjunct professor for 12 years at three leading universities, and being directly involved in both online K-12 and educational gaming ventures several years ago.

I am pleased to share several comments:

1. Game based learning changes thinking and improves creativity as you noted. As an example, using Harvard Business School case reviews to reinforce complex business concepts is the traditional approach used in business schools. If you couple these with a simulation game, for example, which lets students establish product mix and pricing strategies to maximize profits and EPS, you see real benefits. The key point here – the case studies and the gaming alone provide benefits but working together provides greater benefits, i.e., the “ 1 + 1 = 3” situation. We are changing student ‘thinking’ here

2. The optimum solution is as you noted to integrate educational gaming with other forms of instruction as you noted. But the challenge is both creating strong content such as noted above and developing the proper mix of time and resources. I am looking at this challenge now to structure both traditional and ‘gaming’ courseware for educating entrepreneurs ( including possibly K-12 level).

3. We need to educate decision and policy makers on the benefits of educational gaming. On the one hand, many are emphasizing the need for increased social interaction and reducing ‘screen time’- educational gaming and electronic courseware moves in the opposite direction. Creative educational gaming requiring some social interaction (such as integrating teaming an approach I am looking at in entrepreneurial courseware) appears to be an effective solution and there may be others.

4. Decision and policy makers also have to be comfortable moving to electronic media. This is changing and the work of your group and other is helping, but as we know, despite looking at a classroom filled with student I-pads, many instructors and decision makers are still ‘clinging to textbooks.’

Bottom line here – educational gaming is still in its infancy – very exciting, high growth area that can in my view fuel significant improvement in our K-12 educational system and other areas as well.

Starting September 15, 2015, Gemini Business Group, LLC will focus exclusively on addressing the needs of entrepreneurs and investors and offer a portfolio of new venture development and management support services that have been well received in the market.

The revised Gemini Business Group website provides an overview of the new directions we will be pursuing with clients in coming months.

Look for additional announcements in coming weeks on staff appointments , new developments, and updates on the Gemini Venture Partners Emerging Growth Fund.

I also encourage you to visit my blog www.paulbsilverman.com/blog and also sign up for the complimentary Entrepreneurship Today! e-mail updates which I am using to share new venture developments, management tips, insights on new venture financing trends such as equity crowdfunding, and other topics.

I shared why I wrote the new book- to help entrepreneurs create successful companies, moving beyond basic “start your own your business” guidelines to reach the critical five year survival milestone.

I also shared some key points, such as why clearly defining your business model and strategy up-front, is critical, and discussed what readers are saying.

I emphasized that statistics show entrepreneurs are a major force to spur job creation, and economic growth. New policies/programs to directly help entrepreneurs; proposed new university programs to more tightly link to the business community and leverage university assets and IP; and national entrepreneurship initiatives are my vision that I shared during the interview

I will be expanding on these points in upcoming interviews and presentations. Stay tuned…comments always welcomed.

I have received many requests for a copy of a one hour Inside Scoop Virginia syndicated public TV Interview I did on November 21, 2011 discussing entrepreneurship. I am pleased to advise the station posted the interview on YouTube over the weekend.

In the interview, I reviewed the challenges facing entrepreneurs, recommended strategies, and entrepreneurial management perspectives. I also made the point, comparing the U.S. to China and others, that we can be doing much more through creative policies leveraging entrepreneurship to create jobs and drive economic growth.

I also reviewed the following two proposed entrepreneurship programs I developed and shared my plans for these:

Entrepreneur Empowerment Program (“EEP”) – structured regional economic development program driving economic growth and job creation. The program targeted metropolitan areas with a highly structured and targeted entrepreneurship training, mentoring, and management control methodology to help early stage companies succeed and grow. Founded on two core pillars, entrepreneurship and empowerment, the EEP provides the incentive framework at the local and regional level. Empowerment ensures these are locally driven programs, but pursued under the aegis of standards and guidelines set at the national level.

AEGIS (Accelerated Entrepreneurial Global Investment System): A new program attracting overseas entrepreneurial firms to the United States to promote job creation, innovation, and economic growth. The program replaces today’s ad-hoc approach to identify, analyze, track and manage new ventures with a highly structured, well-defined program and builds a base of ‘showcase’ companies in targeted sectors (e.g., alternative energy, bio-tech, health care, others) that provides high upside, economic benefits. To support upcoming discussions, highlights of the AEGIS program are now posted on my blog at AEGIS_Summary 072115

I am now again exploring interest in both of the above programs at both the national and regional levels. When you consider that in the past 15 years, about two-thirds (64 percent) of all new jobs have been created by companies with less than 500 employees, you realize that helping entrepreneurial companies succeed and grow makes good economic sense and creates value as I discussed in the interview.